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 preliminary step, winning political power, without obtaining political supremacy, without transforming the State into the "proletariat organized as the ruling class"; and that this proletarian State must begin to wither away immediately after its victory, because in a community without class antagonisms, the State is unnecessary and impossible. At this stage the problem is not yet considered as to what form, from the point of view of historical development, this replacement of the capitalist State by the proletarian State is to assume.

It is precisely this problem that is stated and solved by Marx in 1852. True to his philosophy of dialectical materialism, Marx takes as his basis the experience of the great revolutionary years 1848–51. Here, as everywhere, his teaching is the summing-up of practical experience, illuminated by a profound philosophical world-conception and a great knowledge of History.

The problem of the State is put concretely: How, in actual fact, did the capitalist State arise, that is, the governmental machinery necessary for capitalist sumpremacy? What have been its changes, what has been its evolution in the course of the bourgeois revolutions, and in the face of spontaneous risings of the oppressed classes? What are the problems confronting the proletariat in respect to this government machine?

The centralized power of the State, peculiar to capitalist Society, grew up in the period of the fall of Feudalism. Two institutions are especially characteristic of this machine: the bureaucracy and the standing army. More than once, in the works of Marx and Engels, we find mention of the thousand threads which connect these institutions with the capitalist class; and the experience of every worker illustrates this connection with extraordinary clearness and impressiveness, The working class learns to recognize this connection by its own bitter experience; that is why it so easily acquires, so firmly absorbs the idea of its inevitability—an idea which the lower middle-class democrats either ignorantly and superficially deny, or, still more superficially admit "in theory," forgetting to draw the corresponding practical conclusions.

The bureaucracy and the standing army constitute a "parasite" on the body of capitalist Society—a parasite born of the internal struggles which tear that Society asunder, but essentially a parasite, "blocking up" the pores of existence. The Kautskian Opportunism which prevails at present amongst the official Social-Democratic parties considers this view of the State as a parasitic organism as the peculiar and exclusive property of Anarchism.